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VIA Chrome 9 and Broadcom Wireless Drivers

Submitted by j.a.watson on February 4, 2009 - 7:16am

VIA Chrome 9 and Broadcom 4312 Drivers

As mentioned in my blog last week, I am continuing to work on getting MEPIS and other Linux distributions to work properly on my HP 2133 Mini-Note. I have made some good progress, thanks to an excellent tip from a friend (Adam Williamson, formerly of Mandriva, now at Red Hat). Adam told me that the last stable release of the "openchrome" driver doesn't work properly on the MiniNote. That matches with my experience - getting it to accept a screen resolution of 1280x768 was nearly impossible, and based on what I saw in the Xorg.0.log file, even when it worked, it was only after thrashing through a long list of attempted alternatives, complaining about unknown modes, handling a variety of "unexpected exceptions", and finally giving up and (begrudgingly) running in 1280x768 mode.

I have picked up the latest snapshot openchrome release, and the difference tremendous. It comes up smoothly, quickly, and according to Xorg.0.log, happily. The screen resolution is just fine, display and presentation are excellent.

I have also got the Broadcom 4312 b/g wireless adapter working with the "b43" driver rather than the "wl" driver that it defaulted to. That turned out to be a bit more trouble than I expected, because when I first tried by just changing the setting in the MEPIS Network Manager Ndiswrapper and Broadcom Preference section, to Enable Broadcom b43 and b44 drivers, the system still loaded the wl driver on boot. I had to specifically blacklist the wl driver, and then it loaded the b43 driver on boot.

However, the truth it that I'm not entirely clear on the tradeoffs between the "wl" and "b43" drivers. Does the "wl" driver really use ndiswrapper, in which case I want to avoid it? The "b43" driver uses some firmware, but how does that balance against using the ndis drivers? There seems to be a good deal of uncertainty about this in the various Linux distributions right now; openSuSE doesn't include a driver for the Broadcom 4312, but does include a shell script which will download and install the b43 drivers; Mandriva doesn't include a driver, but their forums contain instructions on how to download and install the b43, the same as is done by the openSuSE script. I'm interested in hearing any ideas, opinions or explanations of what is best, what the trade-offs are, and such.

As it stands now, I have the HP 2133 multi-booting the following:

Windows XP Professional
MEPIS 8.0 RC2
openSuSE 11.1
Vector Linux 6.0 RC4
Mandriva One 2009.0

I know that the 2133 is an "old" netbook, if you can call something that was announced less than a year ago "old". But my point here is that with the release of the new HP Mini 2140, there has been a drastic price cut on the 2133. This could be a good chance to get a nice netbook for a low price, and if it will run your favorite Linux distribution, it can be really interesting!

jw

Comments

Mepis on the 2133

by MiniMep - Mar 1 2009 - 5:25pm

What a revelation this weekend, trying Mepis on the 2133. I guess like many people working in the industry, I have been a reluctant Microsoft user, more recently a mac fanboy but for as long as I can remember I have wanted to get a system running Linux that I was happy with and could use on a daily basis. This weekend I tried mepis on the 2133, I have tried Ubuntu, Mandriva, Caldera, Suse, Crunchbang, and Mepis is by far the best looking, most useable and most user friendly distro yet, The only thing I dont have at the moment is Via graphics (3D). I saw your post and was wondering if you have a link to the files and instructions for getting chrome working on mepis. It is wotking with sound under vesa at the moment and while it is useable, it is not 100%.

Thanks

j

Nice entry, thanks. I have

by StormyJerry - Feb 4 2009 - 9:24pm

Nice entry, thanks. I have read a comment somewhere that Warren includes parts of b43 with wl, though I have no specific proof of that. I have a bcm4306 chipset that works fine with the b43 driver, though also with ndiswrapper and the Windows driver. I did quite a bit of snooping around on the wl driver when putting together the new User's Manual, and finally ended up just citing the Broadcom statement itself since I couldn't tell exactly what was going on in Mepis 8.

b43 driver is in 8.0

by j.a.watson - Feb 5 2009 - 8:37am

Thanks.

The b43 (and b43legacy) driver(s) are definitely included in 8.0 RC2. I'm just about to write another blog entry about this, because I've been working on it all morning.

jw

MiniNote

by rich_c - Feb 4 2009 - 8:58am

That HP 2133 is a very nice looking little machine. Am following your posts with interest as I reckon one of those with Mepis 8 on it would suit me just fine!

Bowlkook on Mepislovers

Nice Indeed

by j.a.watson - Feb 4 2009 - 1:40pm

Yes, it certainly suits me just fine - and I suppose you can tell that from my writing about it. This evening on the way home from work I stopped in an electronic supermarket, and saw one display there, with a Lenovo S10e sitting right next to it. The Lenovo is being pushed in a number of places as being roughly equivalent to the HP 2133, both in terms of price and capability. Let me tell you, the difference could hardly be more stark when you see them sitting side-by-side like that. The HP, with its very nice looking brushed-metal case and nearly full sized keyboard, made the Lenovo with its plastic case and rather cheesy keyboard look like a toy of some sort.

Now, to be absolutely fair, it is probably a lot easier to get things working right on the Lenovo, because it has an Atom CPU and the associated "mostly well known" chip sets rather than the VIA CPU and chips. But getting it working properly is something that you only have to do once, and I've already gotten far enough on mine that I am convinced that it will all work just fine. So for my money, if I had it to do again, there is no doubt that I would buy the 2133 again.

jw